"In October, the tech industry paid $122 million more on 5G-related imports alone compared to the year before. This year will be a critical one for 5G implementation – but the uncertainty of possibly even more tariffs combined with potential new export controls particularly threaten the U.S.’s global lead on this front. If the Trump administration negotiates with China to end tariffs and address the concerns of forced tech transfers and IP theft, the U.S. will maintain its leadership in 5G."

"About 25 industry leaders attended from companies including Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, along with some of the J.P. Morgan's investment bankers, according to two people with knowledge of the event who asked not to be named because it was private.

Dimon gave some details around what he hopes to accomplish through the bank's health partnership, announced last year, with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway."

“Money itself is changing,” IMF chief Christine Lagarde said in a speech in November last year. Addresing the Singapore Fintech Festival, she asked: “In ten, twenty, thirty years, who will still be exchanging pieces of paper?”

Electronic payments are becoming the norm. Signs now say ‘card only’ in many shop windows and we can pay for low-value goods with a simple tap of our card or even our phones thanks to a range of mobile apps.

In the UK, cash still accounts for just over a third of all payments. But this is predicted to fall to just 16% by 2027 according to UK Finance, the trade association for the banking and finance sector. In Sweden, cash has been virtually eliminated. Only 2% of transactions made in economy are now in cash, according to the Swedish central bank Riksbank.

"Prosecutors say a 35-year-old father who was fatally shot while camping with his daughters in June was killed by the same man who opened fire on a number of unsuspecting campers and motorists in the past few years.

Tristan Beaudette was shot once in the head on June 22 as he slept in a tent with his 2- and 4-year-old daughters at the Malibu Creek State Park in California. Investigators looking into the case and connected the homicide with a series of shootings in the park dating to November 2016.On Monday, prosecutors charged a suspect with carrying out those shootings. Anthony Rauda, 42, was charged Monday with one count of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and five counts of second-degree burglary, the LA County District Attorney's Office said."

The letter sent to Congress on Thursday lays out the 626 groups’ vision for a Green New Deal. On the energy side, it calls on the government to stop leasing federal lands for fossil fuel extraction, to end approval for new fossil fuel infrastructure, and utilize the Clean Air Act to set more stringent standards for greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. It also calls for shifting to 100 percent renewable power by 2035 if not sooner.

"Ten schools in China have new "intelligent uniforms" that will track students' whereabouts with embedded computer chips.

The uniforms, which are equipped with GPS devices developed by a local tech firm, are meant to ensure that students don't skip class. Alarms are set to go off if a student walks out of the school building or falls asleep during a lesson.

According to state-run media, although the school’s administrators and parents have access to the location data, Principal of Renhuai Lin Zongwu said that “we choose not to check the accurate location of students after school.”

Zongwu also noted that attendance rates have risen dramatically since the uniform’s introduction."

"talian health minister Giulia Grillo has unexpectedly sacked every member of the Higher Health Council, the committee of medical experts chosen to advise the government on health policy.Grillo, from the populist Five Star Movement, wrote on Facebook that it was “time to give space to the new” after sacking the 30 board members unexpectedly with a formal letter yesterday.

“We are the #governmentofchange and, as I have already done with the appointments of the various organs and committees of the ministry, I have chosen to open the door to other deserving personalities,” she wrote.

"Mark Zuckerberg has sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook to fund an ambitious biomedical-research project, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with a goal of curing all disease within a generation.

A less publicized initiative related to the $5 billion program includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that essentially translate thoughts into commands. One recent project is a wireless brain implant that can record, stimulate, and disrupt the movement of a monkey in real time."

Last month, motivational speaker Emile Ratelband filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government requesting that his date of birth be switched from March 11, 1949, to March 11, 1969.

On Monday, a court in the Netherlands city of Arnhem rejected his age-changing application, saying that while Ratelband “is at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly,” actually changing the birth certificate is not possible.

“Amending his date of birth would cause 20 years of records to vanish from the register of births, deaths, marriages and registered partnerships. This would have a variety of undesirable legal and societal implications,” the court said, according to the New York Post.

Life-threatening allergic reactions are on the rise, particularly in western countries like the UK, Canada and the US. So what is causing this and how should the business and medical worlds respond? Maija Palmer puts these questions to Julianne Ponan, founder of creative nature, and to allergy experts Adam Fox and Tari Haahtela

The first few trips to space will be flown by test pilots without anyone else on board. Branson says he will be the first passenger. Eventually, paying tourists will also make the trip."I'm not allowed up until the [test pilots] have broken it in a few times, first," he said. "I would love to have gone on this very [first] flight, but [pilots] are incredibly brave people."SpaceShipTwo, Galactic's rocket-powered plane, will fly into space after it detaches from beneath the wing of a mothership. It has been thoroughly tested on the ground and at lower altitudes, Branson said. But, the first few flights to space will be "the dangerous ones."

"Ukrainian police searched the homes of Russian Orthodox priests and Russian Orthodox churches in several cities Monday, stepping up pressure as Kiev pushes for the creation of an independent Ukrainian church.

The eight searches in Ukraine's capital and the nearby Zhytomyr region were part of a criminal investigation into inciting hatred and violence, according to a police statement.

The Russian Orthodox Church said Sunday that more than 20 Orthodox priests had been summoned for questioning by Ukraine's SBU security service. One priest who has drawn particular attention is the head of Kiev's Pechersk Monastery."

"Police say they have arrested about 90 suspected mafia members in a series of coordinated raids in four European countries.

The arrests in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium came as part of an investigation codenamed Pollino that was launched in 2016 against the ’ndrangheta criminal group on allegations of cocaine trafficking, money laundering, bribery and violence, said Eurojust, the European agency that fights cross-border organized crime, which coordinated the operation".

"Central European University (CEU), which is a graduate institution accredited in the US and Hungary, has been forced to stop accepting new students after January 1, 2019, by Hungarian law.As a result, it said in a statement, the institution will launch all US-accredited degree programs in the Austrian capital of Vienna as of next September.It comes after the university has been subjected to verbal and thinly-veiled legislative attacks by Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán."

"A cooling tower at Disneyland was the likely source for all 22 cases in a Legionnaires' disease outbreak last year near the theme park, an Orange County health official has testified.Most of those who fell ill visited the park in the fall of 2017. Disneyland has denied it was the source, pointing to three infected people who had been in Anaheim but not at Disneyland. One of them died.Dr. Matthew Zahn, medical director for epidemiology at the Orange County Health Care Agency, told an appeals board judge at the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration that those three people were in nursing homes in Anaheim, the Los Angeles Times reported. He said health workers visited the nursing homes and determined there were no likely sources of the Legionella bacteria there."

"A new US government report delivers a dire warning about climate change and its devastating impacts, saying the economy could lose hundreds of billions of dollars -- or, in the worst-case scenario, more than 10% of its GDP -- by the end of the century.

The federally mandated study was supposed to come out in December but was released by the Trump administration on Friday, at a time when many Americans are on a long holiday weekend, distracted by family and shopping.David Easterling, director of the Technical Support Unit at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, emphasized that there was "no external interference in the report's development." He added that the climate change the Earth is experiencing is unlike any other."

According to an extensive investigation by the Associated Press, the Trump Administration "has put the safety of thousands of teens at a migrant detention camp at risk" by overlooking the background checks of their caregivers and mental health workers.

According to a memo from the Health and Human Services inspector made public on Tuesday, "none of the 2,100 staffers at a tent city holding more than 2,300 teens in the remote Texas desert are going through rigorous FBI fingerprint checks."

"The idea is simple: spray a bunch of particles into the stratosphere, and they will cool the planet by reflecting some of the Sun’s rays back into space. Scientists have already witnessed the principle in action. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it injected an estimated 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere — the atmospheric layer that stretches from about 10 to 50 kilometres above Earth's surface. The eruption created a haze of sulfate particles that cooled the planet by around 0.5 °C. For about 18 months, Earth’s average temperature returned to what it was before the arrival of the steam engine"

"Officials are now investigating 252 cases of possible acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), including 90 confirmed cases in 27 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of cases under investigation by the CDC is up 33 from last week, and the number of confirmed cases rose by 10, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Tuesday."

"Lithium is a potent psychiatric drug, one of the primary prescribed medications for bipolar disorder. But it’s also an element that occurs naturally all over the Earth’s crust — including in bodies of water. That means that small quantities of lithium wind up in the tap water you consume every day. Just how much is in the water varies quite a bit from place to place.

Naturally, that made researchers curious: Are places with more lithium in the water healthier, mentally? Do places with more lithium have less depression or bipolar or — most importantly of all — fewer suicides?"

Facebook's fight against fake accounts and spam continued Thursday as the social networking giant removed 559 Facebook Pages and 251 Facebook accounts over breaking the site's rules for "spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior."

"Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites," wrote Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy and Oscar Rodriguez, a Facebook product manager, in a blog post announcing the latest purge.

The Portland City Council on Tuesday cleared the way for the city to sue the Trump administration over new rules kneecapping cities' ability to recoup fees from telecom providers.

By its action Tuesday, the City Council added Portland to a growing list of cities, primarily on the West Coast, that are preparing to fight Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission over what officials view as a needless freebie to cable companies.

The initial popularity of gig work prompted a rash of speculation that independent workers — freelancers as well as gig workers and contractors — would soon occupy a steadily larger portion of the workforce. In October, a study by the Freelancers Union and Upwork, a freelancing website, predicted that a majority of U.S. workers would be freelancers by 2027.

Yet the JPMorgan Chase Institute’s report casts doubt on that likelihood. It found that among drivers, 58 percent work just three months or less each year through online economy websites. These include ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft as well as delivery drivers and movers who find work through online apps. Amazon, for example, now uses independent drivers to deliver some packages.

"People over 50 in areas with the highest levels of nitrogen oxide in the air showed a 40% greater risk of developing dementia than those with the least NOx pollution, according to the research, based on data from London.

The observational study, published in the BMJ Open journal on Wednesday, cannot establish that air pollution was a direct cause of the dementia cases. However, the authors said the link between higher pollution and higher levels of dementia diagnosis could not be explained by other factors known to raise risks of the disease."